cleanup

In Tijuana, we were at one point playing The Pixies so loud that the lights started to dim. The low-key calm that usually defines me has recently been lost, all dials turned to eleven for some reason, and the 'go' button pushed hard. I really don't know what to make of it, beyond that perhaps it's the inevitable response to the seemingly exponential increase in the timbre of the trip as it's progressed. Days go on, and I get weirder and wilder, to the point that all plans forward have temporarily dissolved. There's a project in the works that I can't even speak of at this point, beyond to say that if it comes to pass, which is as far from a sure thing as things get, I'll be take some pictures, because they'll definitely be worth looking at.

In the mean time, there's been my long, strange visit to Los Angeles.

Cruising in on the 101 at an ever increasing pace, two Mondays ago marked my entrance to this alien city, built on real estate speculation and now-fueled by the industry of celebrity that I so loathe. There are also people like my brother here though, making their ways and biding their time, LA just a stop along a much longer path toward wherever they're going and whatever they're doing with themselves. His roommate Andrew has a similar path, trying to acquire as much money as he can in the shortest possible period of time, in hope that it will finance the great, next whatever the hell he does with himself. Very different lifestyles, but with near-identical goals. Strange. There's of course also the omnipresent working class, in sufficient numbers and densities to produce some excellent food and a weird vibrance that exists in none but the largest of cities, and few even of those.

I can't tell the story of much of what I've done in LA, simply because there is no story. To an almost strange degree, it has been life as usual, at least as people with very unusual lives live it. Waking up and sleeping, getting food, drinking beer, discussing things of import and not... these are all done on a daily basis, and interspersed between them are drives to the coast, trips to the hills, and occasional ill-fated attempts at exercise, such as when we walked from Santa Monica to Venice Beach, or the extremely poor effort I made at rock climbing. I am the anti-tourist, engaged in the anti-tour of southern California.

There is one thing here superior to most others. One thing that makes all of the bullshit associated with living in California, and specifically southern California, almost seem worth it. That thing is lanesplitting. (Sorry, Mom and Dad.) Watching traffic come to a stop and being able to tuck in, weaving between cages (mostly necessary to be sure my mirrors- which stick out way too far- clear theirs), buffered from whatever stupidity is causing the delay, is among my new favorite feelings in the world. It just seems like such a natural behavior, and now, if anything, I'm somewhat frustrated that I'll have to leave it behind when I leave this state.

Somewhere in there, Craige (my brother) and I did manage to get to Griffith Observatory in the middle of a heat wave to witness Los Angeles in all of its filthy, baking-hot glory.








Normandie Avenue, as it travels almost to the Pacific.




And downtown, for what it's famous for.




More to the point, perhaps the most LA-appropriate bumper sticker I've ever seen (and also my new favorite):




Beers and discussions and driving around aimlessly permeated no few days. Baking heat and traffic on the 405 kept us from our intended lunch spot one day, only to usher us to a spectacularly good Greek deli and a probably-better meal for it. Los Angeles is a mystery to me, virtually all of its better points yet undiscovered and its resources untapped, yet it's not of the sort I entertain dedicating my life to solve. That's other people's work, and they can have it.

Eventually, despite warnings that I may have my head cut off and my body stuffed in the trunk of a car, I made my way to Tijuana. This worry was in vain, and I had an excellent time. This was documented previously.

Eventually, despite warnings that I may be poisoned, I pointed myself back south to Encinitas. Again, this worry was in vain, and I had an excellent time. Brian and his girlfriend Courtney were kind enough to host me for a couple of nights and show me a town I'd previously visited but could never remember, aside from dim recollections of getting into a fight with a palm tree, Duffy's nap in a U-Haul, and an apocalyptic hangover. (That's what you're supposed to do with your twenty-third year though, right?) Dark clouds hung heavy over Camp Pendelton, and a stream of UH-1s droning as they crossed the freeway and made their turns to land. There's a sick sweetness to visiting California's far-southern coast when it's cloudy, always a slight nip to the wind reminding constantly that even paradise has its off days. Add enough up, and like anything good in life, it's quickly possible to resent the near-perfect weather for not being good enough. Seeing through the bars an old friend who's taken a diametrically different path in life, who's unhappy perhaps, despite having a beautiful girlfriend, a good job, and an otherwise very excellent life, because those things require care and control and planning and commitment, still leaves me with a very unsure feeling about which one of us is actually in the cage.




This trip was to be an exercise in sorting myself out, and it seems to be, but it's pointing me in a direction I previously may not have expected. Well, it's pointing me in many directions, actually, none of which I expected. Now, a little over a month in, the preconceptions I've held, the path I'd intended to find, are finally beginning to crumble and fall apart. As always, life proves itself more complicated than I'd given it credit for being. Encinitas marked the beginning of things really coming unglued, both from the perspective it gave and because it was just time.

Unprepared, off, and mind-still-reeling, I set back to Los Angeles, two hours' time and a million years' distance from where I was. Fortunately, I had a ride in front of me to sort it out. I still do. Again, that's another story for another day.

tijuana, pt 2.

Last Sunday (holy shit... that was just last Sunday) morning brought with it one of the strangest and most-protracted "Where the hell am I and how did I get here?" moments I've ever faced. The only one I can remember more dramatic than this was my first morning in Scheveningen so many years ago, which lasted for untold millennia in conscious time (if only probably ten seconds if measured by clock). Lest the blurry pictures give the wrong impression, this was not a function of intoxication, but I suspect from the previous night's detachment and the culture shock of being somewhere and doing something so familiar, and yet still so utterly different from everything else I know. Tijuana is wild and weird and crazy, bereft of the fiddling authoritarianism we get here north of the border, but with a constant sense that fucking up- even if you don't know you're doing it at the time- can have spectacularly bad consequences.

I awoke to the sound of someone moving around. I'd awaken many times actually- about every thirty minutes for the entire night when the latest of my limbs to fall asleep did so- but when someone was moving around, that meant I had something to entertain myself with, and that we were hopefully somewhat close to finding breakfast. These things both proved true, as the rest of the zombie army rose from the floor and acquitted itself shortly thereafter, leaving Mika, Jody, Ed, and I to our plans for tacos and a brief sightseeing tour. This consisted mostly of driving around in Jody's car, examining the bizarre, fractured patchwork that is society in Tijuana.

But first, we stopped at the market, to grab something quick 'til we got further on.




Of course, again, I failed at the picture-taking, because I'm still not good at playing tourist. Watching Kate (of coming fame) snap off hundreds of pictures yesterday, I realize that I'm missing a lot, just giving a glance and a nod as we drive by. I balance this against taking hundreds of pointless pictures though, and the resultant sorting, as well as the critical failure that almost necessarily accompanies having so many pictures of mundane things. There are too many pictures as it is.

We also finally pieced together where the rest of the party guests and bands ended up. It was a near-even split between too drunk to get there (and remember, we're in a place that takes DUIs less seriously than 1970s Texas, so they were actually physically unable to drive due to intoxication... at 8:30 at night) and in jail for what they'd done the previous night. All told, out of four bands, part of one showed up and was joined by a few strays. I have to say, I'm (for lack of a better word) impressed.

Moving on, this was my favorite bit of the red light district, being Prince-themed, and all:




It means "chicken necks".







This is my favorite man in all Tijuana. His tacos are an all-purpose energy booster, rejuvenator, and complete hangover cure. In fact, I didn't even know I had a hangover 'til I ate one of his tacos and was cured of it.




The original plan was to eat more tacos, but at this point I was alone in the desire to do this, so we returned to the apartment through the growing traffic that marked the beginning of the Festival de Mariscos. Oh. Yeah. Somebody forgot to mention that there was a seafood festival happening that afternoon. Equipped with nothing but american dollars and our poor command of Tijuana's particular spanglish, Ed and I ventured out into the fray, leaving Mika and Jody to tend to the homeless man they were employing as a gardener and their three adopted strays.






(As a side note, I have a thing for cars with pickup truck beds, so I was excited to see this parked down the street, on the way:


)















Just like everywhere, cops in Tijuana are assholes:



(Inside joke.)

By the time we'd picked our way down the street, through the various car and bike and (other) bike venues, it became obvious that this was a time for showing off what you had for everyone else to enjoy. I was not expecting to see a huge quantity of really cool hardware, and I didn't, but what I did see there made me happy. These were people who liked stuff, and who were proud of their stuff, but who knew how to enjoy it. There was never a sense that a car or a bike owned its supposed owner, unlike so many I've seen in the past.

And then, in the middle of a closed street absolutely flooded with pedestrians, I kid you not, a drifting competition broke out...







(What you can't see is the three foot high, eighteen inch diameter, steel-clad concrete pole I'm standing directly behind.)


Eventually the black camo-print car lost both its rear tires, and the purple car did a standing burnout while the white car circled it, filling the air with so much smoke I couldn't breathe. Fast escape down some stairs toward the ocean, only to find a rock band on stage and a lucha libre match going right beside it.




This continued for most of the rest of the afternoon. Gabo's band played later that day, which sparked a spontaneous bout of dancing among the dance crew that was up next.






By this point, I was sufficiently disoriented and overwhelmed that I was pretty well done for the day. When I turned down a iced Clamato/beer/shrimp combination, I knew it was pretty well time to go. Back to the couch to regroup, then the short drive to the long wait at the border.



We got through in an hour and a half, which by all accounts wasn't too bad. That experience deserved a post and batch of pictures all to itself, but unfortunately it gets none of that. LA was cake from there.


Parting shots.







I wan'na do that again sometime.

teeeeeeeeeeejuana!

I had a roommate once who, after sousing ourselves completely at our then-favorite watering hole in the East Village, without further provocation threw a fistful of eggplant marinara at a female friend who accompanied us, jumped off his barstool, and ran screaming into the night. We recovered him the next morning, and some weeks later finally managed to collect most of the things he'd left behind and/or strewn about the city, the last of those his wallet, which he'd fortunately (if inexplicably) used to prop up the short leg in the far rear corner of his bed rather than donated to a homeless man somewhere along whatever route he chose home. To this day, none of us have any idea what any of it was about.

Since, that has been the rubric by which I judge all crazy and potential crazy. When I meet a new person, I ask myself, "Do I think this person is capable of assault with pasta in red sauce? Better?" There is a worse, more-serious sort of crazy that goes well beyond the scope of that particular incident, but it's not the sort of thing one might look on as a positive trait in a person. I had never until Tijuana expected to get that vibe from an entire city. Needless to say, an excellent time was had by all. I think. Fairly soon into it, exhaustion and disorientation had taken away any sense of bearing I might have had otherwise.

This was hatched over beers with Ed on a Tuesday night. Mikhaela had invited me and anyone who wished to join to attend her boyfriend Gabo's 37th birthday party at their place in Playas de Tijuana the following Saturday. There were supposed to be four bands, potentially a whole mess of people, and a huge quantity of food and drink. Deciding that this indeed did bear all the markings of a good time, plans were made (I use this term in the loosest sense imaginable), and Ed showed up mid-Saturday in his bright teal Honda Civic to make the trip south. Eschewing the motorbike was a mixed blessing. Air conditioning made traffic more tolerable, but left us sitting in it much longer. Ease of travel for the bulk of the trip on highways would have been met with massive slowdown in the brutally pot-holed roads south of the border. Not that there was really a choice in the matter regardless. All of Ed's mounts are out of commission for one reason or another at the moment, and two-up through traffic on the ZRX was not an option either of us wanted to pursue.

After a long burn through some scenic bits of southern California and a last-minute drag of the car to make sure no stray ammunition was floating around in the hatch (HUGE problems if you get caught bringing guns or ammo across the border), we made Mexico in not-terrible time. Mika and Gabo welcomed us warmly once we finally found parking, and quickly plied us with beer.






This is a picture of worlds colliding.



Mikhaela, one of my oldest friends (I met her on our first day of college) and Ed, who I'd previously met twice through an internet motorbike forum.

Soon after we arrived, one of the bands started to trickle in as well. Warmup and practice. This guy was quoting Jaco Pastorius. (Extensively.)




An aspiring luchador with Mika:




The sun set high, almost, and faded into a long dusk that saw more people trickle in, food being prepared, fires lit, and the party finally gaining momentum.
















I have no idea who these people are, but they were adamant that I take this photo.




One of my favorite aspects of the party was that it included everybody. All ages. All classes. Coming from a place where early- and late-twentysomethings usually segregate themselves at parties, it was something of a shock. This was perhaps compounded by my relatively weak command of Spanish. Still, I was that much better off that Ed, who spoke absolutely none. The party continued into the night, devolving further into chaos. Beer was omnipresent, especially after a run to Oxxo, the Tijuana equivalent of 7-Eleven. My credit card company will be amused with that one, no doubt. Mika eventually evicted everyone from Jody's (the next-door neighbor and general co-conspirator) apartment to extinguish the advances of a particularly amorous (and catastrophically drunk) Mexican.






















And yes, it was a little blurry like that by the end of the night. That couch proved my least-comfortable accommodation thus far on the trip, so some degree of blurriness was welcome. As I drifted off into the blackness, I had no idea what was in store for the morning, beyond promises of tacos and confirmation of whether the glass of water I'd consumed just prior to bed was, in fact, safe to drink.